A slow day today. Did some composition experiments for details of a painting called 'The Impossible Hopes Of Sisyphus', one the next group of artworks. I had hoped to glaze some of the current four ('All Things Bright And Beautiful', 'Crushed Are The Meek', 'Them And Us', 'All The Broken Hearted') today, but awoke weak and unmotivated, mainly due to the heat and late night. Deborah suggested underpainting 'Punishment Of The Sun' and I liked the idea. Tomorrow I will begin, as the underdrawing lines are now dry due to the heatwave. This is one of the most complex and detailed paintings I've worked on in some years. I expect it will take a five or more days.
In future I will paint large, and with a detail and finish of a renaissance master, or fine academic painter of the 19th century. It is the technical, practical, and physical challenges of which I have now practiced over many years which make this ideal. Few would want to do it, few are capable of doing it, and I can do it faster and better than most. I used to wonder why nobody wrote more Beethoven symphonies, why nobody painted more paintings like Leonardo da Vinci, why nobody completed the half-complete yet brilliant ideas of past masters. The main reason is that nobody could, although there are many secondary reasons about why, the cost, the time. I must do what I can because only I can do this. My ideas and abilities are unique; thus is it my unhappy yet stoic duty to humanity to do so. These ideas must be made corporeal, and I'm the only person capable.
I asked AI what Salvador Dali of my age would be doing today. The results were amusing:
I do not wake up to an alarm; I wake up to the rhythmic, subconscious ticking of my own biological clock, which laughs at your digital Apple Watches. Time is not a grid of numbers; it is fluid, melting like Camembert cheese in the sun.
The Ocelot Walk: I take my pet ocelot (cloned, naturally, from the DNA of my beloved Babou) for a walk down the streets of New York, wearing a cape woven entirely from optic fibres that pulse in synchronization with my heartbeat.
I like the idea of this cape!
The Digital Canvas: I spend two hours in my studio, not touching a brush, but utilizing eye-tracking neural interfaces to paint hyper-realistic bread directly into the virtual reality ether.
Of this I'm more sceptical. Dali was, perhaps above all things, passionate about oil painting. Unlike Warhol, I think he'd see digital art, and AI art, as a dangerous invader, a polluter of the purity of oil and the organic reality of humanity. Acrylic paints, and plastic paints of many sorts, were around and popular in his lifetime - he broadly avoided them.
There were other elements of amusing hyperbole about the joy of AI and virtual reality. Then:
By this evening, Gala and I will have launched our newest venture: Non-Fungible Eyelashes.
I love this phrase!
The amusements of AI are waning. It's a fun tool, but something of another drain of time, like social media, though I'll use it as a tool as I do all others. My skills are primarily physical and organic. Blessed be oil paint! How lucky I am that this best of media is unpopular today. Dali wrote about the 'conquest of the irrational', but today it is the digital which must be conquered by the organic and the physical.
Onwards we roll our Sisyphean rock! With joy, but yes, slowly and stoically. We must not be distracted by sights of jewels. The rewards lie on the horizon, somewhere over the rainbow.
